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Podcast: TWO REPORTERS
Episode: When many African Americans speak, what are they speaking?
Description: They're speaking African American English, according to linguist Lisa Green at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Lisa grew up speaking AAE in Louisiana, and since then, her ground-breaking research has found that AAE is based on a system of consistent grammatical rules, pronunciations and definitions - in other words, Lisa's studies show, "it's not mainstream English with mistakes." Some call it a dialect, which evolved from the African languages that slaves spoke blended with plantation English; in fact, when someone says, "she aks" instead of "she asks," they might be echoing Old English from centuries ago. Lisa argues...